Blocking Countries From Your Website: A Practical Guide For Small Business Owners

If you own a small business website, sooner or later, you will see traffic and spam from places you never planned to work in. Card testing from faraway countries. Contact form spam. Bots that try every login page they can find.

A very natural reaction is

“I only serve customers in my region. Can we just block everyone else“

You absolutely can block some countries. The real question is how you do it without slowing your site down or breaking your visibility in Google and other search and AI crawlers.

This guide walks through when country blocking is a good idea, when it becomes risky, and what options you have depending on who controls your domain. It is written from the point of view of Pressific, a managed WordPress provider that uses Cloudflare and other tools to protect client sites at the network level.

Why People Want to Block Entire Countries

Common reasons we see include:

• Payment fraud or abuse coming from specific regions
• Contact form spam and fake leads from locations you never serve
• Compliance or licensing limits for particular territories
• Reducing noise so your logs and security alerts contain fewer junk entries

Government and security bodies acknowledge that geo-blocking can reduce malicious and non-operational traffic from regions with no business relevance and can lower the amount of attack noise you have to process. 

However, it is only one layer of security. Attackers can and do use VPNs and proxies to appear as if they are in an allowed country. 

What Country Blocking Actually Does

At a high level, country blocking means that when someone visits your site, their IP address is looked up in an IP-to-country database. If the country is on your block list, the traffic is rejected, usually with a 403 Forbidden response.

There are three main places this can happen:

1. At the network edge

For example, using Cloudflare firewall rules that inspect the visitor’s country and return a block page before the request reaches your web server. This is fast and efficient because the malicious traffic is stopped in front of WordPress.

2. At the web server

Using server-level rules, such as NGINX or Apache configuration, that block traffic by country code. This is still relatively efficient but requires deeper server access.

3. Inside the application

Using a WordPress security plugin or custom code that checks the visitor location after it has already reached PHP and your database. This is easier to install but slightly slower and less robust. 

When It Makes Sense to Block Countries

For most small business sites, we think about country blocking in terms of a small, well-chosen block list rather than a blanket ban on everyone except your own country.

Situations where a modest block list can make sense:

• Your product or service is clearly local and will never be relevant outside a handful of countries
• You see repeated card fraud, fake bookings or abusive behaviour from specific regions
• You have a legal or licensing reason to deny access in one or more territories

In those cases, blocking a short list of high-risk or irrelevant regions can reduce bot noise and abuse without impacting real customers. 

Why Blocking the Whole World Is Risky for SEO

Search engines and AI crawlers do not always visit your site from the same country as your customers.

Googlebot in particular:

• Crawls from several different locations and IP ranges around the world 
• May appear from data centres outside your main market
• Is joined by many AI crawlers that also fetch content from their own locations 

Site owners who use strict country blocking rules in Cloudflare sometimes see Google Search Console fill with errors like:

• Failed: blocked due to access forbidden 403
• Googlebot is blocked due to the country rule

Those errors appear when a firewall rule blocks Googlebot or other legitimate crawlers that happen to arrive from a country on the block list. 

Specialist articles on country blocking also note that if you block regions completely, your site becomes less visible or not visible at all in those regions.  For some businesses, that is fine. For others, it is an unintended loss of reach.

On top of that, repeated 403 errors and timeouts can be a negative signal for search engines, which prefer sites that respond consistently and quickly. 

How Pressific Normally Approaches Country Blocking

When a client asks us to block countries, we usually take three steps.

Step 1: Fix the basics first

Before we touch geo-blocking, we make sure the fundamentals are in place

• A properly configured firewall and Web Application Firewall
• Hardened WordPress install and login protections
• Good hosting and caching, so the site responds quickly

Often, this already cuts down a lot of bot noise from everywhere.

Step 2: Maintain a small, sensible block list

We almost never recommend blocking “all other countries” apart from your own. Instead, we typically

• Keep a short list of countries that are safe and sensible to block for most local service businesses, where there is no realistic customer base
• Tailor that list for each client, depending on their industry and audience
• Review the list from time to time, because traffic patterns and risk change

This usually gives most of the benefit without the search and availability risks of global blocking. 

Step 3: Implement country blocking at the network level

Where possible, we configure Cloudflare to do the blocking for us. That means

• Country rules in Cloudflare WAF that block or challenge visitors from specific regions
• Exceptions for major search engines and uptime monitors so they can always reach the site
• Rules that stop high-volume Chinese and other bots before they even touch WordPress 

What Happens If We Cannot use Cloudflare yet?

Sometimes a client arrives with a site that does not yet use Pressific hosting or DNS. In those cases, we may not have access to Cloudflare as the primary DNS and network edge.

If the domain is sitting on another provider, but the site is on WordPress, we still have options:

• WordPress security plugins that include country blocking
• Web server rules if we manage the server, but not the DNS
• Temporary solutions that add a small delay to each request but keep things safe enough for a while

These methods work, but they will never be as efficient as blocking traffic before it reaches WordPress. They are best seen as Option 1, an acceptable short-term compromise. 

Why Full Domain Control Gives the Best Result

The ideal situation is very simple:

• Your website runs on WordPress
• Your domain sits with an independent registrar such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, Dynadot or Cloudflare Registrar
• Nameservers are set to Cloudflare, which then provides DNS, firewall and CDN caching for the site

Cloudflare calls this a full setup. You point your nameservers at Cloudflare, Cloudflare becomes the authoritative DNS for the domain, and you gain access to its security and performance features. 

When Pressific has this level of control for a client, we can:

• Block unwanted countries at the network edge
• Keep search engines and AI crawlers happy and able to reach the site
• Add caching and other performance tuning on top

What If Your Domain Lives on Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, or Weebly?

Many small businesses start on website builders such as Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or Weebly and register their domains there. The catch is that those platforms often limit how much control you have over nameservers and DNS.

Wix

If you purchased your domain directly from Wix, Wix does not currently allow you to change the nameservers for that domain. You can edit DNS records and point the domain at other services, but you cannot delegate the entire domain to Cloudflare while it is still registered with Wix. To change nameservers, you first need to transfer the domain away from Wix to another registrar. 

Wix also states that it does not support DNS proxies such as Cloudflare in front of a Wix-hosted site, and requires that DNS records used for connecting a domain to Wix are set to DNS only. 

Squarespace

Squarespace is more flexible. Their current documentation shows that you can open the domains dashboard for a Squarespace domain and change the domain nameservers there. 

That means:

• If your website is still hosted on Squarespace, you would normally keep Squarespace nameservers
• If you plan to move the site to a managed WordPress provider such as Pressific, you can switch the nameservers to Cloudflare when you are ready

In practice, many owners still prefer to transfer the domain from Squarespace to an independent registrar, simply so site and domain are not tied into the same platform. 

Shopify

For domains managed by Shopify, the focus is also on editing DNS records rather than handing over nameservers to another DNS provider. Shopify lets you edit A, CNAME, MX and other records inside its admin for Shopify-managed domains, and it encourages you to point third-party domains inwards rather than point Shopify domains outwards. 

In practice, store owners who want Cloudflare to be the main DNS and firewall in front of their site usually register or transfer their domain to an external registrar first, then point DNS at Shopify. If you leave the domain inside Shopify, you have less freedom to use Cloudflare as a full reverse proxy.

Weebly

Weebly and Square give you DNS record control for domains registered with them and allow you to modify name server settings from the domains page, but again, the typical setup is that the site stays behind their own infrastructure. 

If you want Cloudflare and advanced security features for a WordPress site, it is usually simpler to move the domain to a registrar that focuses purely on domains.

What This Means in Plain Terms

If you have full control of your domain at an independent registrar and your site runs on WordPress, you are in the best possible position. Pressific can:

• Move DNS to Cloudflare
• Block abusive countries at the network level
• Keep Google and AI crawlers happy
• Add caching and performance tuning on top

If your domain is tied up inside Wix, Shopify, Squarespace or similar builders, you still have options, but there are more steps. Often, the cleanest path is:

1. Transfer the domain to a registrar that lets you control nameservers easily
2. Move the site to WordPress if you have outgrown the page builder
3. Put Cloudflare in front so you can combine firewall, caching and country blocking properly

We always pair any country blocking with proper analytics and monitoring. If something important is being blocked, we would rather see it early and adjust than be surprised later by missing traffic or search visibility.

And Finally, One Important Reminder

Country blocking is not legal advice, and it does not replace compliance with privacy and cookie laws in the places where you do business. If you collect data from visitors in regulated regions, you still need correct consent and legal guidance, even if you block some other countries at the same time.